As the only winner of the Gold Partnership award from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Electronics Challenge for its e-cycling and peer-mentoring programs, the Bonneville Power Administration is considered a model and mentor for other agencies trying to improve their technology recycling programs.
The Portland, Ore., organization, an agency of the Energy Department, estimates that it safely disposes of its equipment for $4 per pound—90 percent of which covers labor and packaging costs.
The remaining 10 percent of the costs go for transportation and for recycling and disposal fees, according to Steve Sander, a Bonneville senior environmental scientist.
Cradle to grave
E-cycling is part of Bonneville’s comprehensive asset-management strategy, which involves assigning a unique tracking number to every device so it can be followed from the day it arrives to its final resting place in the waste stream.
“They really need to know where this stuff is going,” Sander said. “It’s not good enough to just hire someone and say, ‘Here, make this go away.’ ”
To dispose of its e-waste, Bonneville officials selected a high-tech shredding facility in Arizona, to reduce transportation costs.
“We were only interested in facilities that were going to do a certified destruction of equipment,” Sander said, adding that, for security reasons, Energy requires physical destruction of hard drives rather than the data-erasing process called degaussing.
Bonneville officials also were impressed with the facility because it did almost no landfilling, save for its own office waste, or overseas shipping, which some other West Coast brokers are known to do. This means they sometimes ship unprocessed machines to foreign countries, where the machines’ data could be compromised or the equipment mishandled, causing environmental problems, Sander said.
Before choosing a recycling vendor, Sander said, an agency must ensure its e-waste is properly handled, by visiting or auditing the recycling or disposal site to verify compliance with regulations on how the hardware is broken down, resold or passed on to another facility.
Even if a facility meets federal regulations, agencies still may face additional state and local rules.
Bonneville, for example, could be fined by Oregon if it stores waste for more than six months, said Annette Guarriello, a Bonneville program analyst.
Sander said agencies should check whether a prospective disposal facility has the required state and EPA permits, and check references.
Despite this focus on proper recycling and waste-disposal practices, officials at EPA and model agencies, including Bonneville, emphasized the importance of having a broader lifecycle strategy to reduce the disposal rate of PCs and other equipment.
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